


Tokka

by AnaliseGrey



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Bucky as the Asset not being terribly concerned with the prospect of dying, Canon-Typical Violence, Hanahaki Disease, Hopeful Ending, M/M, egregious application of WTF-ery, vomiting (sort of but not really)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 10:24:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14134131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnaliseGrey/pseuds/AnaliseGrey
Summary: Bucky is 25 the first time it happens.He and Steve are at the automat, sharing a sandwich on one of Bucky’s rare days off. Steve is ranting about Billy from around the corner, how he’s an asshole without the sense god gave a cockroach, when Bucky feels something catch in his throat. He chokes, sputtering until his eyes water, finally coughing up what looks like a flower petal, small and blue.





	Tokka

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [this piece of music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAR-7YatJxY), which I had playing on loop while I wrote most of this.
> 
> There's a certain degree of 'wtf' associated with this piece. I wouldn't call it crack, exactly...more like magical realism. The general idea of what's going on is described in the end notes, so feel free to have a peek, or don't, and find out after. :)
> 
> This piece sprang almost fully formed from my head in the space of a day, and has not been beta'd. All mistakes are my own.

Bucky is 25 the first time it happens.

He and Steve are at the automat, sharing a sandwich on one of Bucky’s rare days off. Steve is ranting about Billy from around the corner, how he’s an asshole without the sense god gave a cockroach, when Bucky feels something catch in his throat. He chokes, sputtering until his eyes water, finally coughing up what looks like a flower petal, small and blue.

“You alright?” Steve looks at him, concerned.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Something was in the sandwich is all. Might wanna check your half.”

Steve snorts indelicately, and he swipes at his bangs, which keep falling down into his face. “Already ate mine, so if there was something in it, it‘s too late now.”

Bucky shrugs, lifting the top piece of bread from what remains of his part of the sandwich. Nothing but the chicken and cheese he’d been expecting.

“Musta been a fluke, I guess.”

***

When Bucky is 26, he receives his draft notice, and spends the rest of the afternoon drowning himself in liquor at the seediest bar he can find before he drags himself back home to his and Steve’s apartment to break the news. He has to stop in an alley to throw up what feels like every meal he’s ever eaten, and doesn’t pay much attention to the bursts of color that shouldn’t be there, pieces of daisy yellow and African violet buried in with the partially digested bar snacks and copious amounts of cheap alcohol.

By the time he gets home to talk to Steve, they’re forgotten, and he’s too busy putting up a brave front for Steve to give it too much thought.

***

Bucky goes to war, and leaves a trail of flower petals in his wake that have no business being in a trench on the Italian front. Black-eyed susans near Capua, blanket flower and blue flax outside Sparanise. The line pushes north, and the flood of petals gets worse, purples, reds, and yellows trampled into the mud as they move. When the 107th gets taken, it stops temporarily, but within the day they’re back, strong and plentiful as ever. The floor of Bucky’s cell is littered with butterfly weed and California poppy. The others watch him carefully, but never mention it. If any of the other prisoners coughed the way Bucky did, it would signal they were goners, pneumonia or worse about to snuff them out. When Bucky coughs, it means flowers. No longer just petals, but whole flowers, choked out when he least expects it. It wears on him, but at least the colors are a nice distraction.

Until Zola notices.

Bucky is removed from the work line and taken to the science division. He knows this is it for him; anyone who gets taken to the science wing...well, they don’t come back. They’d sometimes hear screaming when it was quiet at night, echoing through the factory, and he wonders if Dugan and the others will be able to hear him when it’s his turn to scream.

They sit him in a chair, strap his arms and legs down, another wider strap across his chest, and ask him questions. He answers as he was trained to do: name, rank, serial number.

“Where do the flowers come from?”

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sargeant,  32557038.”

“Are you enhanced?”

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sargeant,  32557038.”

It goes on, and he tries to let his mind wander, and every once in awhile he chokes up another flower- scarlet sage and Texas bluebonnets. When they start experimenting, lemon mint comes up, making his throat burn and lips tingle as he coughs it out. They have to strap him down on his stomach, face cradled by a hole in the table so he won’t choke.

They strap him down on his back, and he knows whatever they’re going to do next, they either don’t expect him to survive, or they don’t think it will matter. They administer a series of injections, the contents burning like acid through his veins, and it feels like immediate combustion. He can’t help struggling against the straps holding him down, biting part-way through his lip in an attempt to keep himself from crying out; some part of him remembers, and doesn’t want the other guys to hear him like this. He tries to go away in his head, and when he starts to regain his senses, there’s a blanket of gloriosa daisies and clasping coneflowers over his shoulders and on the table near his head. He thinks he has a petal stuck to his lips, but most of his mouth is numb, so he can’t tell. For lack of anything better, he starts repeating his information again- name, rank, serial number- and it helps keep the hysteria he can feel edging in at bay.

Then Steve is there, hovering over him, bigger and stronger-looking than he has any right to be, his hair glowing in the overhead lights like a halo. For a moment, Bucky thinks he’s dead; it feels like the only reasonable explanation.

“Bucky, it’s me.”

“Steve?” the petal that had been stuck to the side of Bucky’s mouth tumbles loose, spiraling down to land on the table as Steve snaps the restraints holding Bucky down.

“I thought you were dead.”

Bucky looks Steve up and down as he gets up off the table, still incredulous, but more willing now to believe he’s still alive. “I thought you were smaller.”

Steve gives him a lopsided grin. “I joined the Army.”

The building shakes, and Bucky doesn’t look back at the scattering of brightly-colored flowers left on the table as they run.

***

The next few months, the flowers recede. Every few days Bucky will cough up a smattering of petals, but the full flowers have stopped. He’ll get a knowing look from Dum Dum from time to time, but Bucky just shakes his head, and Dugan leaves it alone.

They plan the mission on the train, and he and Steve tease each other about roller coasters before ziplining down, everything normal and ok, until suddenly, it’s not.

When Bucky falls, he lands in a tumult of ice and blood, brightly colored petals falling gently behind in his wake to land on the snow around him.

A few weeks after his recapture, he starts coughing up whole flowers again, pain following behind this time, like they’re trying to take root in his chest. Nothing his captors do to him can make them stop; it doesn’t matter how many times they beat him or starve him, he can’t help it, they just come. He wants more than anything to go home, to see Steve again, for the war to be over. The flowers increase in frequency, piles building up in his cell, until the first time they try the wiping process.

They wipe him, and for the duration the wipe lasts, the flowers stop. 

The protocol for use is set, written down in a small red notebook.

At the first sign of petals, the Asset gets wiped, whether he’s in the middle of a mission or not.

For decades, there’s no Bucky, no flowers, just ice and orders.

***

The Asset sees the man on the bridge.

When his mask is ripped off, a torrent of forget-me-nots tumble out, bright periwinkle blue in the sunlight, and incongruous on the pavement.

“Bucky?”

The Asset glowers at the man in confusion, the tickle of something in his throat as he says, “Who the hell is Bucky?”

By the time his handler team gets him back to the bank vault, he’s coughing up handfuls of flowers every few minutes, and the technicians working on his arm have to keep sweeping them out of the way, picking petals out of the metal workings with tweezers.

The man in charge, Pierce, tries to talk to him, convince him he’s needed one more time, to shape the future the way he’s helped shape the last century. All the Asset can think of is the man from the bridge, his quiet repetitions of, “But I  _ knew  _ him.” punctuated by more flowers falling from his lips. His chest hurts when he coughs them up, and he’s idly wondering if it’s something serious when Pierce says, “Then wipe him, start over.”

The Machine comes down over his head, and both his memories and the flowers are gone.

***

“ _ Please don’t make me do this. _ ”

The target stands on the walkway of the helicarrier, and the Asset sizes him up. Nothing the target says will dissuade the Asset from performing his duties to the best of his abilities. The man is his mission, and he must complete his mission.

They fight, and the Asset notices a pain in his chest, just below where he thinks his throat would start. It distracts him just long enough for his target to catch hold of him, get him into a choke hold and knock him out.

He comes to with a gasp and a cough, a tumble of red petals, rose, he thinks, falling from his mouth. His target has almost gained the advantage, but the Asset can still stop him. He pulls his sidearm and fires, making all three shots when the helicarrier lists suddenly, knocking him sideways, a beam falling down and pinning him to the floor. He struggles, pushing at the beam, his metal arm whining with the strain, but it won’t budge. He’s going to die here, when the helicarrier inevitably falls, taking him with it into the Potomac. He doesn’t think this is so bad; Pierce had made it pretty clear this would likely be his last mission. Just a quick fall, then nothing.

Just- just a quick-

His brain stutters and he coughs, the smoke overwhelming him, and when he manages to stop coughing there are flower petals scattered around him, completely out of place. Before he can figure out what’s happening, his target, the Captain, is at his side, somehow, helping to leverage the beam up and off of him. He scrambles out and tackles the other man to the floor, near the helicarrier’s broken edge.

“You know me.”

The Asset shudders, swinging wildly at the target under him. “No, I don’t!”

“Bucky, you’ve known me your whole life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

The Asset swings again, punching the man, trying to ignore the roaring he can feel starting up in his chest, working up into his head, wanting to come out his mouth. Instead, he manages to grit out, “Shut up!”

The Asset pummels the man across the face, but the man doesn’t fight back, and the Asset can’t understand why. They  _ always  _ try to fight back in the end, even when it’s hopeless; why is this one different?

“I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my friend.” The man is slurring now, his eyes mostly swollen shut, blood from scattered cuts dripping down the side of his face. “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, Buck.”

Something in the Asset’s-  _ James’-  _ mind turns over, like an engine catching, and before he can do anything else, the bottom falls out from under the man- Steve, oh god,  _ Stevie-  _ and Steve is falling, like...like Bucky did.

For one long, helpless moment, Bucky watches Steve fall, disappearing into the murky debris-littered water, before he dives down after him in a flurry of flower petals.

***

Two days later, Steve Rogers wakes up in the hospital. Sam is dozing in one of the uncomfortable visitor chairs next to him, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Trouble Man’ playing on the stereo.

Sprinkled over his chest, bright against the crisp white hospital sheets, are piles of white and pink streaked zinnia petals.

**Author's Note:**

> I...don't even know.  
> I was inspired by a post on tumblr, which introduced me to Hanahaki disease.  
> From fanlore.org:  
> "The term hanahaki comes from the Japanese words hana (花), which means "flower", and hakimasu (吐きます), which means "to throw up".  
> This trope has several variations, and is used in both happy and tragic stories. It often develops over months or even years, beginning with coughing up a few petals and growing in intensity (and pain) until the victim is vomiting entire flowers, by which point the disease has entered its final stages."
> 
> I tweaked it a bit to suit my purposes, and I'm actually surprised how much I like this, despite how fast it came together, and how...odd...it is at times.  
> Feel free to come say hello to me on tumblr! I can be found on my fandom page at [KitKatCabbit](http://kitkatcabbit.tumblr.com/) or on my writerly page [Analisegrey](http://analisegrey.tumblr.com/)


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